We often think of stress as being mental (worrying thoughts, fears, threats) or physical (bodily harm, discomfort). Whilst it is true, the origins of stress can be different, the biological response to stress regardless of its origins is the same – the body experiences the same changes in the nervous system and subsequent increases in cardiovascular activity – such as increased blood pressure and heart rate and essential hormonal changes to ensure energy is available for the body to move away from or deal with the stress – known as ‘the fight or flight response’ (Lovallo et al., 2016; McEwen, 2000; Yarybegi et al., 2017).
Why do we have a physical reaction to mental stress?
In essence, mental stress triggers serve as an early warning signal that a threat or danger might be imminent. Our thoughts alert us to a threat which activates our body to prepare for movement, so that we can move away from and/or fight danger that’s coming our way. This is a very efficient process that allows us to survive, learn and develop resilience. Essentially, when we are exposed to short-term stress, the body responds, the stress dissipates, and the body adapts by attenuating stress responses to similar threats in the future. This process of ‘stress and adaptation’ allows us to build resilience both emotionally and physically (Fink, 2017; Lovallo et al., 2016; Yarybegi et al., 2017).
The problem is that life is often a conveyor belt of demands with very little opportunity for stress to dissipate – a leading cause of chronic stress in modern life. As a society, we are increasingly bombarded by worries about things that haven’t happened or ‘might’ happen (The Burnout Report, 2025). Existing in this state leaves us experiencing symptoms of chronic stress: feeling anxious, fearful and overwhelmed and we start to notice it impacting our life, relationships, careers AND our body. Ongoing stress exposure is the problem, not the stress itself, because it means the body has little chance to turn off the stress response and our cardiovascular, immune, endocrine and nervous systems get chronically activated.
Stress and Exercise – Benefits and Risks
BENEFITS
One of the most common ways for us to manage our physical and mental health is exercise. Recent surveys (UKactive and PureGym) have even reported that people are increasingly motivated to exercise for mental health benefits, more so than physical. There is also indisputable anecdotal and empirical evidence supporting the qualitative reports that movement in the form of day-to-day activity and structured exercise helps us to feel emotionally better, whilst also reducing our risk of many illnesses and diseases. Exercise improves mood and brain health: it enhances brain development, memory, mood, and even lowering pain. It’s also relatively cost-effective and can be done with friends or family, providing social support and reducing isolation/loneliness. It also appears to be the case that the fitter we are, the more resilient our nervous system is to stress, with fitter people producing less cortisol (Rimmele et al., 2007). So, it makes sense that many of us use movement to manage our stress.
RISKS
BUT there’s a potential problem – exercise is also a stressor. In order for our muscles to receive the energy and oxygen required to carry out activity, the body must activate the sympathetic branch of the nervous system and the endocrine system, initiating an acute stress response. This is not an issue per se; in fact, it’s a necessary reaction to help us to move. BUT it’s still adding to the stress response and body strain. In addition, exercise also requires energy (to fuel the stress response as well as the movement required) and time – both of which are often in short supply for those exposed to ongoing life stress. For some people, where energy is readily available, life isn’t very demanding, and they have time to both fuel and recover from exercise, it is unlikely to be a problem. For example, professional athletes often factor this into their training plan and daily schedule. However, most people aren’t professional athletes; most people have busy, hectic lifestyles where they fit exercise in around life demands (such as being a parent, carer, business owner, or employee). In these scenarios, it’s not uncommon for them to struggle with fatigue, insomnia, anxiety, low mood, chronic illness and/or chronic stress exposure and use exercise in an attempt to obtain the advertised health benefits including improved mood.
How and why exercise can become a risk factor for burnout
Unfortunately, when this happens, training specificity is often missed, meaning exercise is not always tailored or prescribed to the biological state of the person doing the exercise and recovery is ignored or seen as a time-consuming luxury. The result – people are inadvertently adding training stress to life stress, chronically activating the stress response, increasing risk of low energy availability, stress-induced exhaustion, ultimately leading to burnout and/or overtraining.
So, whilst exercise IS an excellent way to improve mood and manage mental health, it needs to be carefully considered so that it’s added to a body and mind that can absorb it. The alternative is an exhausted body and mind that can no longer take part in the very thing they enjoy, and that can help improve mood and health – exercise.
So, the message is clear. Exercise can and does help manage daily stress and build resilience when it is done in short bouts, supported with adequate rest and recovery. If someone is experiencing a demanding period in life (moving house, travelling, renovating, having a baby, grieving, recovering from an illness, or navigating chronic illness), a personalised exercise prescription for stress is required.
More isn’t always necessarily better – the goal is not to blindly move more (justifying what you’re doing because there is some evidence to support that it will help), ignoring how the body is coping. The goal is to match exercise to stress capacity – allowing for the presence of mental and physical stress.
When capacity is high, more exercise (intensity and/or volume) can be tolerated.
When capacity is low, high demand will lead to chronic stress and/or illness or injury, ultimately taking away the very thing that can help when done right.
What the research says about exercise and chronic stress management
Whilst there is a plethora of research recommending exercise for managing short-term perceived stress in healthy individuals, and some research supporting the use of brief physical activity interventions for burnout, there are currently no definitive guidelines or standards for exercise prescription in individuals experiencing ongoing chronic stress and/or burnout (Franklin et al., 2021), where the individuals are symptomatic and exhausted.
What does exist, however, is research examining the effect of exercise in individuals experiencing stress-induced exhaustion (SIE). Stress-Induced Exhaustion (SIE) is a clinically recognised condition characterised by prolonged stress exposure that leads to systemic mental and physical exhaustion (not limited to work), resulting in physiological dysregulation and impairing functioning across both work and everyday life.
A study by Kling et al., (2025) examined the effect of a single 20-minute cycling session (low–moderate intensity) on discomfort and fatigue in women with chronic stress and exhaustion disorder. Participants with SIE reported increased discomfort and fatigue during exercise, but this led to improved energy and reduced stress and anxiety afterwards, with no worsening of symptoms at 24 hours and no difference between intensities. Whilst this study highlights the potential benefits of exercise, it focuses only on short-term, acute, non-weight-bearing activity, leaving a gap in the literature investigating how our bodies may respond to sustained, longer-term exercise, especially at moderate and high intensities.
That said, research in sport science shows that excessive training (intensity and/or volume) and a lack of recovery lead to overtraining syndrome – the symptoms of which overlap considerably with the symptoms of chronic stress and burnout (Cadegiani & Kater, 2019).
Practical Considerations for Exercise Prescription for Chronic Stress or Burntout
When working with an exhausted, chronically stressed and/or burntout individuals, the primary aim needs to be recovery. This re-establishes homeostatic balance so that systems that have been affected by chronic activation of the nervous system (i.e. the cardiovascular, immune, endocrine, digestive, and reproductive) get a chance to rebalance and symptoms to dissipate. This can mean removing exercise, but given that some movement can help enhance mood, improve physical health and lower cortisol and initiate the resting branch of the nervous system (PNS), it makes more sense for exercise to be prescribed/adapted within the context of all life stress that someone is experiencing. Often, this is where many go wrong, including the most qualified, well-meaning health, wellness and fitness professionals – individuals exercising start experiencing a plateau in progress or an increase in symptoms, despite using tried and tested advice or programmes (some of which may have worked for them before).
Whilst this may or may not be due to the design of the training plan/programme, if someone is chronically stressed or burntout, it’s more likely to be the case that the exercise programme hasn’t been specifically prescribed to account for the stress the person is experiencing (physically or mentally). This mismatch between stress load and exercise programming increases the load and can be avoided by making the practical adaptations outlined below.
- Consider total stress, not just training: Work, sleep, illness, and emotional load all count towards strain and affect physical resilience.
- Watch for early warning signs: Fatigue, poor sleep, low motivation, irritability, or lack of progress. Make the most of wearable technology, incorporating objective measures of stress (such as heart rate variability) to monitor trends and how stress might be building.
- Prioritise recovery: Sleep, nutrition, and rest are where adaptation happens – exercise prescription/training programmes that don’t include this are inadvertently sabotaging training effects and not allowing the body to downregulate the nervous system before adding more training load.
- Adjust, don’t abandon: It may be a good idea or even necessary to completely rest; however, a reduced intensity and/or volume may be sufficient. Low-moderate intensity exercise (especially low/restorative movement such as walking outside in nature, practising Pilates or yoga) has been shown to lower cortisol and activate the parasympathetic nervous system.
- Match the goal to the moment: Sometimes the goal is not only about the outcome or ‘making progress’ — it’s management of mood, fitness maintenance or regulation of emotions. When life is busy, it’s okay to adapt the goal and load, which will inevitably improve long-term performance without contributing to chronic load.
Learning how to adapt exercise to the person and their biology, as well as their psychology, is a critical skill for us all so that we can continue to benefit from the positive health-related adaptations exercise has to offer.
Want to learn more?
→ Explore our accredited CPD Training in Stress Management for Health & Wellness Professionals. Evidence-based training specifically designed to help professionals work with chronically stressed individuals.
© 2026 Stress Ed. | Bernadette Dancy. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission from the author.
REFERENCES
Cadegiani, F. A., & Kater, C. E. (2019). Novel causes and consequences of overtraining syndrome: the EROS study. BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine, 5(1), e000542. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjsem-2019-000542
Epel, E. S., Crosswell, A. D., Mayer, S. E., Prather, A. A., Slavich, G. M., Puterman, E., & Mendes, W. B. (2018). More than a feeling: A unified view of stress measurement for population science. Frontiers in neuroendocrinology, 49, 146–169. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yfrne.2018.03.001
McEwen BS. (2000). Allostasis and allostatic load: implications for neuropsychopharmacology. Neuropsychopharmacology. 2000 Feb;22(2):108-24. doi: 10.1016/S0893-133X(99)00129-3. PMID: 10649824.
Fink, G. (2017) Stress: Concepts, Definition and History. In Reference Module In neuroscience and Biobehavioral Psychology, Elsevier Inc., Amsterdam, 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-809324-5.02208-2
Franklin, B. A., Rusia, A., Haskin-Popp, C., & Tawney, A. (2021). Chronic Stress, Exercise and Cardiovascular Disease: Placing the Benefits and Risks of Physical Activity into Perspective. International journal of environmental research and public health, 18(18), 9922. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18189922
Kling, A., Jonsdottir, I. H., Börjesson, M., & Ekblom, Ö. (2025). Psychological responses to acute exercise in patients with stress-induced exhaustion disorder: A cross-over randomized trial. BMC Psychiatry, 25, Article 84. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-025-06484-1
The Burnout Report (2025): http://www.mentalhealth-uk.org/, https://stress-ed.co.uk/key-findings-from-the-burnout-report-2025/
Rimmele, U., Seiler, R., Marti, B., Wirtz, P. H., Ehlert, U., & Heinrichs, M. (2007). The level of physical activity affects adrenal and cardiovascular reactivity to psychosocial stress. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 34(2), 190-198. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2008.08.023
Yaribeygi, H., Panahi, Y., Sahraei, H., Johnston, T. P., & Sahebkar, A. (2017). The impact of stress on body function: A review. EXCLI Journal, 16, 1057–1072. https://doi.org/10.17179/excli2017-480
© 2026 Stress Ed. | Bernadette Dancy. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission from the author.
